auspiv

As far as I can tell, the Vulcan (rocket), and the engines, all performed flawlessly. The Astrobotic Peregrine has a uncontrollable propellant leak (not sure if it's best characterized as a leak or something else but the net result is the same) and will not be able to complete its primary mission (moon landing).

up to 45% efficient at lower power (0.5W in, 0.225W out) https://www.farnell.com/datasheets/2785190.pdf

SCADA networks historically have very low available bandwidth (often due to being on the other end of a 10 mile radio link over 915 MHz with the radio & RTU powered by solar panels) and rely on a poll/response methodology. Even if nothing has changed, the poll happens, and the response sends the same exact data every poll. MQTT can be a far more efficient protocol if you only send updates. Multiply this situation by 1000x RTUs (now imagine you have a slightly better radio link from office to a remote tower, but that remote tower is communicating with 10x RTUs). You can see the need for efficient communication.

Now - realize this is how natural gas pipelines are monitored/controlled in the mountains. You want that kind of communication to be reliable and scalable right?

Sure showing time and N works. But it'd be a lot easier to interpret the data quickly if it was shown in terms of operations per second. Smaller bars do not usually mean improved performance.

But also experiment with recordsizes of 8k and 16k. The larger the recordsize, the more potential compression you get, which may be offset by additional delay caused by read/modify/write of the larger record (i.e. reading/writing 32k instead of 8k or 16k).

Let me rephrase - 'constant output 24/7/365 renewable power'

I believe wind/solar are still cheaper than geothermal. They'll be priorities #1 and #2, with geothermal to make up any difference.

edit: and when the sun isn't shining and wind isn't blowing

Edit: Fervo energy is using the same exact techniques used by oil/gas for the hydraulic fracturing so yes the risk exists, but they didn't run into any issues. Seismic risk is typically highest near water disposal wells, which continuously inject water at high rates (>10000 bbl/d). These geothermal wells were fractured once, and whatever is injected is produced a few hours later (no net increase of volume after the initial frac job).

From the white paper (https://eartharxiv.org/repository/object/5704/download/11142...) -

"Prior to starting the operations phase of this project, a preliminary screening assessment was performed to evaluate the potential risk of induced seismicity at the project site. We followed the guidelines outlined by the US Department of Energy’s Protocol for Addressing Induced Seismicity Associated with Enhanced Geothermal Systems (Majer et al. 2012). Based on our analysis, we developed and implemented a Traffic Light System (TLS) to mitigate the risk of potential induced seismicity associated with the project. The TLS system was in effect throughout all major phases of the project from July 2020 through June 2023, including drilling, completions, stimulation, and well testing. All observed seismicity fell within the Green TLS protocol, with no significant impact or incident throughout the full duration of the project."

Note that Fervo Energy (the geothermal start-up that Google partnered with) is founded by an ex oil/gas drilling engineer who decided to take all the lessons learned by oil/gas of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing over the last 20 years and apply to geothermal.

Turns out all the assumptions for the economics of geothermal were based on 20+ year old data. With the advances applied from oil/gas, geothermal is squarely back in the economic region of renewables.

It took them 72 days to drill their injection well to 11220 ft. 59 days to drill their production well to same depth. So from their 1st well to their 2nd, they've already improved 18%. Oil/gas drillers can do 11220 ft wells within a couple days.

Sure 3.5 MW isn't a ton but this was literally a proof of concept. They can expand by orders of magnitude by drilling hundreds of these injector/producer doublets. They could probably get 2-3x more power per well after optimization. They can easily control production by altering the injection rate. I forget the exact delay but basically, if they ramp up/down injection, they see the same exact response on the production side a couple hours later. They expect to be able to combine this with solar/wind to get a firm 24 hour renewable base load.

16 page Fervo white paper with tons of data (pressure, temperatures, geologic setting, frac plans, etc) - https://eartharxiv.org/repository/object/5704/download/11142...

Note that they do monitor induced sesmicity and have green/yellow/red light system for when to stop if necessary. Again, this was for the proof of concept with the Department of Energy.

Edit: with the exception of the high temps (376F max recorded), the drilling is all very standard oil/gas style that happens all the time across the US. 376F isn't unheard of in deepwater offshore but it's damn hot.

Kraken SDR has 5 receivers, all synchronized to the same time. There was a "passive" radar project that used its hardware but got shutdown.

https://hackaday.com/2022/11/19/open-source-passive-radar-ta...

apparently passive radar is governed by some US Munitions list:

US Munitions List, Category 11(a)(3)(xxvii): Bi-static/multi-static radar that exploits greater than 125 kHz bandwidth and is lower than 2 GHz center frequency to passively detect or track using radio frequency (RF) transmissions (e.g., commercial radio, television stations);

The military planes are hit or miss for what they put out in terms of position. Most will do Mode S transponder, which does not, by itself, include position. But if you get enough of these ADS-B receivers in an area, they can triangulate the position.

Every few weeks we have "mean jets" (what our 3 year old calls fighter jets, I think from the Iron Giant) buzz our house near KBJC going in for landing/taking off. They're super loud and often gone before you can get outside to see them (they leave at 400+ kts).

yep and you also can get multiple updates per second per plane. I think it tops out at 8 or so which is entirely unnecessary for the radar-style app but you can count on an update between each "scan".

https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/04/18/moving-my-ads-b-an...

https://austinsnerdythings.com/2021/03/09/receiving-aircraft...

vMotion. works great

It is definitely worth $10/month. Very curious how you can not justify that

Not entirely clear from the article/blog - is this an RDS instance (equivalent) or EC2 instance (equivalent) in a cloud with storage attached?

I didn't think it was possible to edit postgres.conf on a RDS type managed database. But the author also talks about scaling up quickly as performance walls are hit while they work on optimizing stuff.

You mean Cloudflare can't at all blame Flexential for:

1) not informing CF of unplanned maintenance on electrical

2) not informing CF that they had failed over to generator due to a ground fault on their PGE transformer

3) not informing CF that ALL their generators failed and were on backup batteries

4) not informing CF that power had completely failed within the DC

5) notifying CF that anything at all had happened for 48 minutes (which was after all the UPS batteries had died)

Yes, this is a one sided analysis. I haven't seen the Flexential one (is there one?).

https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-mortem-on-cloudflare-contro...

The linked previous project does:

https://github.com/gbonacini/nuclear_random_number_generator

"I tested the randomness both testing the bytes and the single bits in the binary file created from the ASCII file from the appliance console ( see Appendix here or test directory for full result text).

Accordingly with ENT man page: "If the percentage is greater than 99% or less than 1%, the sequence is almost certainly not random. If the percentage is between 99% and 95% or between 1% and 5%, the sequence is suspect. Percentages between 90% and 95% and 5% and 10% indicate the sequence is “almost suspect”", so having 85.17 percent in the bytes test and 60.52 percent in the bits test should be fine."

Entropy = 7.998386 bits per byte.

Value Char Occurrences Fraction 0 413451 0.500284 1 412981 0.499716

Total: 826432 1.000000

Entropy = 1.000000 bits per bit.

What I've seen is they require fancy materials (carbon fiber, etc) due to the extremely high rotation rates (>100k rpm). For maximum efficiency, the flywheel needs to be in a vacuum to eliminate frictional air resistance losses. They also need magnetic bearings.

None of these are exactly a problem, they just cost money to implement properly.

I would say this copy + pasted list is not great.

No HVAC required - ok but you do need to suck down a huge vacuum, which is a lot more difficult than traditional HVAC

Hot and cold - see above point

All steel - not sure about that, maybe for lower speed applications, which reduces the amount of energy stored

Safe & reliable - hard to say that a huge mass spinning >100k rpm is "safe". By itself there is no fire hazard sure. but what if your magnetic bearings fail and it hops off and starts trying to escape it's (vacuum) enclosure. Then you have tons of sparks and pressure differences and other non-fun things.

O&M - [citation required]

30 year life - surely with all the plusses listed, it should be longer than 30 year life?

You have listed the advantages directly from a company that sells flywheel devices. Surely there are no biases here.

You say that but helium is essentially not renewable and is not produced naturally at rates anywhere near human consumption. Not sure if you're aware but helium currently only sourced as a byproduct of natural gas production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_production_in_the_Unite...

It's not easy to in general. Gas plants typically operate via cryogenic processes. The boiling point of ethane at standard pressure is -128.2F, so you need to get below that to get everything but the methane to liquefy. -128.2F by itself isn't terribly difficult but doing so on a highly variable flow, at a well site with questionable power, with 100% reliability will be difficult.

Gas plants typically also operate above atmospheric pressure because the boiling points are higher (meaning less cooling required). That, also by itself, isn't difficult, but does add complexity and cost.

Properly "fixing" leaking wells involves getting a workover rig on site and pumping 10-1000 barrels of cement. Not to mention developing a plan and submitting it to the state for the well work permit, which hopefully comes before the rig gets on site. Rigs will not do work without a valid permit. I used to be a PM for well abandonment.

Minimum cost would be in the $80k-100k range. Double or triple that if you run into any issues. My most expensive abandonment was around $400k, which was for a simple, vertical 5000ft well.

There are a lot of nuances to assign the gas a value. Our electricity is apparently in the 5-6 cents per kWh range. I did the math recently and running a generator on site can cut that in half. But then you're in the business of running a fleet of hundreds of generators. Is it cheaper per kWh? Yes. But then factor in the cost of mechanics, techs, maintenance, etc. and that bring it close to even. You've also locked yourself into a bad spot if the price of natural gas spikes 3x like it did in summer 2022 with the Russia/Ukraine war and all of a sudden your self-generated electricity is far more expensive than utility and you can't sell any of your gas because you never build the gathering lines to get it to a pipeline.

Interesting, I was not aware of the 91% vs 98% flaring vs combustion efficiency. Seems like a relatively recent finding based on the Ars article date.

You are correct in that many countries DGAF and just flare/vent the combined equivalent of multiple Texas's. Iraq, for example, flared 16.8 bcm (= 593 billion cubic feet) in 2018.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/natural-gas-p...

~500 miles from the nearest liquification facility? no. they need to compete with all the other producers to get gas on a pipeline that goes to the Gulf coast to a liquification plant.

I had to look through the article twice to find it - "per unit of production"

Natural gas (which is of course composed primarily of methane) free takeaway capacity from West Texas is super low. Pipelines are booked solid and and 1-2 new ones are being commissioned yearly (google search for 'Permian natural gas pipeline projects').

Oil/gas companies generally never want to straight up vent (i.e. release directly into the atmosphere) natural gas. It gives no economic value. However, natural gas production is an inevitable byproduct of oil production, especially in the Permian basin shale plays, which can lead to either having to shut-in your oil well, or flare, or vent.

I work for an oil/gas company that operates in the Permian. Our wells range from ~3000 standard cubic feet per barrel of oil to 10000. Some of our bigger wells produce >1000 barrels of oil per day, which corresponds to 3-10 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. We do not vent unless an emergency situation arises. Even for pigging and other procedures (blow downs, etc.), we capture the natural gas. We do flare if needed, but that is limited. Small amounts of gas gather at the top of oil tanks and rather than risk an explosion (due to lightning and other unpredictable things like that), the small amount of gas is flared. The state of TX has flare limits per day and per month on both a pad and well level.

We have also electrified a very large portion of our operations, reducing the amount of natural gas burned to generate electricity (this happens all over the basin). All of our large gathering facilities but one are electric powered. This can be a challenge with gas compressors, which have traditionally been gas powered. Gas compressors are commonly in the 1500-3000 horsepower range each, and there are 4-12 per facility. That's a lot of electricity. One facility does have a gas generator powered component, which can be used to kick-start other facilities to get things going again in case of a major, multi-facility shutdown.

Long story short - gas doesn't have a ton of value in the Permian basin. In decreasing order of preference, operators will want to 1) sell gas, 2) use it to run gas compressors or generators, 3) flare it, or 4) vent it.

Some enterprising people have constructed trailers with natural gas generators powering bitcoin miners. This option can be appealing to operators who would otherwise be flaring/venting the natural gas. Not sure of the contract commercial terms but presumably it benefits both parties. Straight up burning methane is the same whether it is via flare or generator. Both are better than venting due to the increased greenhouse gas potential of methane vs CO2.

Computers have been used in the industry since at least the 1970s. These days, every major oil company has $XXX million in supercomputers cranking through seismic data in a number of extremely computationally intensive ways. Reservoir simulation is also computationally intensive, but can be done at the individual workstation level.

Here's a paper from May 1985 titled "Applications of supercomputers in the petroleum industry" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003754978504400.... Found that without even looking for oldest example.

Do you want sensational click-bait articles or do you want actual weather forecasts by people who understand the topic and know how to interpret the models? Take your pick. One is simple, the other is not.

I have found ChatGPT to be incredibly useful as well. I don't do any fancy prompt engineering, just use plain English. Here are a few recent examples that spit out useful results.

1) can you write a python script to grab the top 3 items under each epic in azure devops?

2) postgres where clause where any item in a string array = 'GoogleApi.Entities.Places.Common.Photo'

3) here is a SQL row output of a single column. can you please extract the 30 as a new column?

P2, Site Inspection: Due 3 days ago (30-day freq.)

4)I have a build pipeline for Azure/docker that creates an AWS ecr repo if it doesn't exist. how can this specify that the images should be scanned upon creation?

      - task: CmdLine@2
        displayName: Create repo if it does not exist
        inputs:
          script: |            
            aws ecr describe-repositories --repository-names {env}-{project_name} || aws ecr create-repository --repository-name {env}-{project_name}

5) postgis query to get places sorted by distance from a lat/lon (say -104.01, 38.88). column is named location and has data like: POINT (-106.676354 39.526714)